•When you’re unconsciously searching
for something and you don’t know what
•When you stop maturing emotionally
•When you’re looking for love and
scarred by your past
•Are you the lost
generation?
The Lost Generation
• The youth of America was not only physically but emotionally devastated
after World War I.
• The pain this generation felt left them to feel empty inside and
depressed. This generation became amoral and even hopeless at times.
• Most people wished to find love but found it hard to do when they
themselves did not feel whole, therefore feeling like they had nothing to
offer
• Many people found temporary comfort in sexual activities and alcoholic
beverages. In the end, this solved nothing
• Many people tried to hide how they truly felt although they truly could not
• Many writers tried to capture the essence of this generation through
many individual characters living in it, and they were successful in doing
so
• And it is important that through literature we further our understanding
and compassion of different kinds of people in different time periods via
analysis, evaluation, and reflection
Robert Cohn is lost
• Robert Cohn learned boxing not because he loved to do it but “to
counteract the feeling of inferiority and shyness be had felt on being
treated as a Jew at Princeton” Robert Cohn gave his classmates the
consent to make him feel inferior. He never quite fit in anywhere and
he is a very lonely character.
• Robert married the first person who was nice to him, this shows that
he lost faith in all people and felt that people who were nice to him
were very rare. He did not marry her because he loved her but he
did marry he because he felt that if he did not marry the first nice
person he met, he would lose her and never find her again. He also
felt that she was the best he could do (showing his lack of
confidence) and vise versa because “he did not want to deprive her
of himself”. He felt a girl who was nice to him was a “divine miracle”
and married her as a “rebound from the rotten time he had in college”
• His wife leaves him
Robert Cohn is lost
• Robert marries Frances as a “rebound from his discovery that he
had not been everything to his first wife” and he thought he was.
This also lowered his self esteem. One can infer that Robert is
happy that anyone would want him so he marries the only person he
feels is and ever will be interested in him. He will take whatever he
could get.
• Robert’s confidence depends on how others treat him. When people
praise him and the work he does, he becomes cocky. He is like a
puppet, if someone says something nice his strings go up, if
someone says something mean his strings go down.
• Robert Cohn never knew love but finally finds it in his best friend’s
ex who is engaged and doesn’t even know he exists
Robert Cohn is lost
• Robert is like a child and will remain so. He lives in a fantasy world
and takes everything he reads to face value and uses it as a
guidebook on how to live his life no matter how unrealistic it is. He
tries to relive what he reads.
• He wants to be a football player and randomly go to South America,
a romantic land according to the book he read and find the love of
his life
• Robert is constantly traveling to escape himself and his feelings but
has not learned that he can not run away from himself
• Robert lives in his fantasy world because he does not like to face the
real world, the pain from his past and his self dissatisfaction. He tries
to make things happen by just traveling to a land with unlikely
expectations that things will happen on their own. He has unrealistic
dreams because he does not approve of his reality.
By: Carolyn Bordowitz